Arnold for 3ds Max 5.8.2.2 (What's New in 2026.2)

HTML Statistics

A new type of visual Statistics display has been added to MAXtoA. By enabling the HTML statistic, a rich visual report of all rendering statistics can be displayed. (MAXTOA-1952)

Statistics paths now pre-populated

The paths for log file, statistics, HTML reports, and the render profile now all have a default path, which is the same location and file name as the main render output. (MAXTOA-1982)

Default lights now optional

The 3ds Max default lights are now optional. A new Use Default Lightscheck box (on by default) controls whether default lights are rendered. (MAXTOA-1882)

Only initialize Arnold once per 3ds Max session

In the past, MAXtoA created a new Arnold session for every render. Now there is a single ongoing Arnold render sessions for the duration of the 3ds Max session. This greatly improves time-to-first-pixel, and gives overall a snappier performance. (MAXTOA-1725)

Data channels support in RenderTimeInstancing API

The support for the 3ds Max MaxSDK::RenderTimeInstancing API has been improved to pass on any data channels correctly. (MAXTOA-1943)

USD version sanity check

Every new version of MAXtoA checks that installed version of MaxUSD is compatible with MAXtoA, and warns you if either component needs an update. (MAXTOA-1948)

Network (BackBurner) rendering disables Arnold RenderView

When rendering on a remote machine, having Arnold RenderView pop up serves no function, and network rendering now behave as if Arnold RenderView was turned off. To go back to the previous behavior, you can set the environment variable MAXTOA_USE_ARV_IN_BACKBURNER=1

Expose Procedural Instancing Optimization option

You can set the new Procedural Instancing Optimizationin in the Advancedsection of the rendering settings.

Render stats report

An HTML-based, interactive viewer for the Arnold render statistics. You can quickly visualize and inspect detailed render stats such as frame render time, memory usage, render time by category or by node, and texture usage. (ARNOLD-14140)

GPU Toon shading

Arnold GPU now includes initial support for the Toon shader and the contour filter. The Toon shader is currently limited to rendering direct lighting only (no reflections, refractions, or indirect lighting). (ARNOLD-15656, ARNOLD-15988)

Light transforms in point instancer

When an instancer contains lights, it now takes their local matrix into account if instance_inherit_xform is enabled.

Improved Global Light Sampling

Rendering photometric (IES) lights and mesh lights using Global Light Sampling is now higher quality, using the same render settings and taking the same render times. (ARNOLD-13692, ARNOLD-15859)

Performance enhancements

• Faster procedural instancing: Arnold is faster at rendering scenes with complex hierarchies and point instancers. The newoptions.procedural_instancing_optimization flag usually produces speedups between 1-2x, but for sufficiently complex scenes the speedup can be significantly larger. This new optimization defaults toexhaustive mode, which gives the most speedup. Exhaustive mode may use more memory; you can switch to conservative mode to use only the optimizations that do not consume additional memory. This setting is currently only supported for batch CPU rendering.

  Animal Logic ALab - 1.2x faster	Intel Jungle Ruins - 1.3x faster	Activision Caldera - 18x faster

• Better scaling for parallel scene init/update: The parallel scene init and update are now faster than before, especially on many-core machines. (ARNOLD-14902, ARNOLD-15718)
• Reduced scene update time with progressive batch renders: Negative AA progressive renders no longer perform a redundant full scene update on the final pass. (ARNOLD-15974)
• Improved interactivity when using only skydome and distant lights: Scenes that contain only skydome and distant lights are now significantly more interactive, especially in scenes with many nodes. A scene with close to nine million nodes that rendered in about 1fps now allows for more than 20fps. (ARNOLD-16114)
• Faster polymesh node init: Time needed for polymesh node initialization has been reduced when there are many meshes being initialized at the same time on machines with many CPU cores. For instance, the Activision Caldera scene went from 63s to initialize to 8.7s on a 120-core Windows machine. (ARNOLD-16008)
• Parallel instancer initialization: Multiple instancer nodes can now initialize at the same time. On a 120-core Windows machine the scene init time for the Intel Jungle USD scene went from 115s to 43s. (ARNOLD-16120)
• Minor Imager performance improvement: Enhanced memory copy operations within the Imager framework, resulting in improved performance. Stress tests demonstrate a reduction of 60 milliseconds per Imager chain. (ARNOLD-16256)
• parallel_init metadata: A warning is now printed when the parallel_init metadata is missing from a procedural. Missing metdata results in parallel_init being disabled for the procedural, which can result in slower scene initialization for those procedurals that could have safely benefited from parallel initialization. (ARNOLD-7051)

USD Enhancements

API changes

• AiProceduralExpand now updates procedurals: This API function now both initializes and updates the procedural node, along with expanding (loading) the children nodes. This ensures any custom procedural_update functions are called. (ARNOLD-15898)
• Viewport proxies for points, polymeshes, and volumes:AiProceduralViewport() now accepts non-procedural nodes such as points, polymesh, and volume, and returns viewport proxy representations. (ARNOLD-15941)
• Render stats report APIAiReportSetFileName() sets the file name so that the render creates a render stats report (an html file), AiReportGetFileName() gets the render report file name. (ARNOLD-14140)
• Cryptomatte metadata: Common cryptomatte metadata is now included in the Arnold core, so plugins do not require an mtd file for cryptomatte. (ARNOLD-15661)

Incompatible changes

• Single full scene update in batch: Arnold now only does a single full scene update for render sessions in batch mode. This can cause issues for plugins allowing the modification of the scene in batch sessions, as dependencies between nodes are not tracked. Plugin developers should use interactive render sessions when modifying the scene. (ARNOLD-15974)
• Removed options.gpu_sparse_textures: The gpu_sparse_textures option has been removed as the functionality behind it had already been removed in a previous release of Arnold. (ARNOLD-16237)

Component changes

• Update Autodesk Desktop Licensing: Autodesk Desktop Licensing is updated to v15.3.0.1298. See the release notes for more information on this release. (ARNOLD-16104)
• Upgrade OIIO components: Various components used by OpenImageIO have been upgraded to more recent versions. In particular, jpeg files should now load and write noticeably faster than before. (ARNOLD-7892, ARNOLD-15771)
• Upgrade Customer Error Reporting (CER): CER was upgraded to 7.1.8 to address security vulnerabilities. (ARNOLD-16144)
• Upgrade Autodesk Analytics Program: Arnold includes a newer version of the Autodesk Analytics Program (ADP), which brings stability and performance improvements. (ARNOLD-16031)

Bug Fixes

System Requirements

• 3ds Max 2024, 2025, or 2026
• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
• GPU rendering and Optix denoising work on Windows and Linux only, and require an NVIDIA GPU with the Maxwell architecture or later.
  • We recommend 570.153.02 or higher drivers.
• Intel OIDN GPU support is limited to:
  • Intel Xe dedicated and integrated GPUs
  • NVIDIA GPUs using Turing or newer architectures
  • AMD GPUs with RDNA2 (Navi 21 only) and RDNA3 (Navi 3x) architectures